Economists: Do Brazilians Have Naked Dreams?

Do Saudis have as many dreams of being naked in unexpected places as Americans do? What
about Brazilians? It's a pretty interesting question. Also interesting
is that it's being asked on the New York Times Freakonomics blog.

For years, the economics-themed Freakonomics blog has been running a "daily bleg." A "bleg," explains
Stephen Dubner, is "blog + beg--i.e., using a blog to beg for
information." Readers write in, get posted, get responses. The blegs
don't always have to do with economics. This one's particularly far from the blog's field, though. Reader Josh Slavin writes about a friend's dream of being naked at a party. He, too, like many, has had these "naked dreams":

It's
such a common trope in American culture that it made me wonder if
people in other cultures have it too. Do more open/less prudish
cultures like maybe Brazil have it as a common dream? What about much
more conservative cultures, like in the Middle East--do they have a
much more reserved version of it?

The Freakonomics staffers are
intrigued, tossing out a quote from Gustavus Hindman Miller's
Dictionary of Dreams before opening it up to readers. It is, after all,
a bleg.

Of course, the whole idea behind the Freakonomics enterprise (books and
blog) was that the tools of the economic discipline could be
applied to a variety of questions. If Freakonomics coauthors
Levitt and Dubner wanted to rise to the challenge here and figure out
a way to divine the nude-dream frequency of Brazilians with supply and demand curves, well, the Wire wouldn't complain.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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